I woke up a few hours ago at an ungodly hour, furiously scribbling down the details of an extremely vivid dream in which I reluctantly led a group of slackers after a zombie invasion. For some inexplicable reason, I had to conduct a series of tasks, ranging from spray painting certain areas of my neighborhood to signify where the zombies were to releasing benign animals who needed food and companionship, without being bitten by a zombie. The strangest part of the dream was that, if I screwed up and was bitten (and I was gnawed on quite regularly), I had the opportunity to respawn at my “save point” and conduct the series of tasks yet again. Undoubtedly, my dream reflected my worries about the present state of America, as well as the very long days I have been spending editing the second season of my audio drama, in which I have often pushed forward in a zombie-like manner to get closer to the end. After I canvassed my apartment to make sure that there were no zombies around (such are the irrational fears we act upon when we have a particularly alluring and real-seeming dream), I realized that this dream, like many other vivid ones I had, was actually my subconscious trying to tell me that I was working too hard by myself and that I needed to reconnect with the world around me, as well as practice better self-care. But why had my dream been so vivid? Well, before I hit the hay, I did have some rather tasty spaghetti with fresh tomatoes and mushrooms that I had whipped up from scratch, as well as two glasses of red wine. Tomatoes and wine tend to cause me to have extremely vivid dreams. And I had thoughtlessly consumed both. Or was it so thoughtless? Perhaps my appetite subconsciously gravitated towards wine and pasta because it needed to work out something that I was obliviously avoiding. But it did get me thinking about the connections between what we eat and how we dream.

There is surprisingly little research out there on the interesting question of whether eating certain foods results in a snoozer having particularly vivid dreams. The great Winsor McCay — anticipating the Surrealists who arrived twenty years later with their dadaist thoughts — wrote and illustrated a popular newspaper comic called Dream of the Rarebit Fiend — in which various characters would eat a rarebit that would result in a series of ridiculous and dreamy images. The rarebit was an entree that involved melting rich cheese diluted with ale on top of toast, with a bit of mustard and cayenne pepper or paprika stirred in. And the belief that Welsh rarebit had some connection with sleep extended even to an old episode of Gomer Pyle – USMC (specifically “Gomer the Welsh Rarebit Fiend”), in which the rarebit-eating Gomer was discovered sleepwalking.

But a century after McCay’s vivid visuals and commitment to cheese, there did prove to be something to the silly theory. A 2005 study from The British Cheese Board suggested that various types of cheese could produce different types of dreams. Those who ate Blue Stilton over the course of a week tended to have incredibly vivid dreams. Cheddar caused subjects to dream of celebrities. Cheshire caused nice and dreamless sleeps. Red Leicester was more responsible for nostalgia and childhood. Lancashire cheese inspired people to dream about work. Amazingly, nobody has thought to follow up on these experiments. One would think that a deep dive into fromage-fueled phantasmagoria divorced of an organization with a vested interest in getting people to scarf down cheese at all hours of the day might be one of those goofy yet useful experiments that might help us customize our dreams in the same crazed manner that yuppies hold up the line ordering baroquely bespoke beverages at a cafe.

In 2015, a Canadian study conducted by Tore Nielsen and Russell A. Powell, citing Winsor McCay, did find that dairy products were the most likely to inspire disturbing dreams. Sugar and dairy products were closely tied on the bizarre dreams front. However, the two psychologists were careful to suggest that other factors could have inspired these dreams and that further research needed to be done, since the study had been confined to merely bizarre and disturbing dreams. Additionally, the study had been confined to undergraduates rather than an all-ages group. Moreover, those who suffered from PTSD or anxiety were more inclined to stress eat. And this, in turn, could be the true factor behind the vivid and disturbing dreams. (Duly noted, Canadian dream experts! Tomorrow I’m going for a long walk and sticking with salad!)

Writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Michelle Carr suggests that this idea that eating food leads one to dream in a particular way may be a false belief. If we eat a certain food (in my case pasta and red wine; in the case of the Brits behind the cheese experiment, the gloriously stinky Stilton), this may just be one of those fateful habits, not unlike Dumbo clutching his magic feather, that causes the brain to dream bigger under certain gustatory conditions that represent more of a placebo effect. The so-called connection between tryptophan-heavy turkey and dreams, to say nothing of the spicy food connection steeped in common adages, may just be our bodies working harder to digest heavier food, thus interfering with our regular sleep cycles.

So it’s quite likely that food is getting in the way of the real reasons we dream like this. This does suggest that more research, independent of cheese boosters, should be done to determine once and for all how we can hack our dreams and come to greater terms with our subconscious fears. I do know that my dreams have often given me the clues of how I need to live and what I need to write. If we can’t have our flying cars, surely we can figure out better ways to coax out the crazy cinematic experiences inside our head.

Chuck Todd is an incompetent and irresponsible menace, a preening peacock floating on his own arrogance and stupidity. He is unfit to practice journalism and should not be hosting Meet the Press or any other television news show.

I’ve seen a lot of detestable news anchors in my time. I have watched actual adults who claim to uphold the Fourth Estate deracinate their journalistic credibility the minute that they get their own show, failing to push back against the powers that be who steer their “news” programs into crass shouting matches, relentless ego-stroking, and the infernal trap of touchy-feely relatable celebrity. These deplorable and obscenely paid pundits, who we entrust to relay the events of our day and to challenge anyone who answers a question with flagrant lies and willful equivocation, have conducted interviews with their schnozzes smothered in dun and their hubris puffed up by multiyear contracts. They never tender the vital critical inquiries at the right time and often contribute to a dangerous political landscape because they have nothing to lose. Before Trump was even a reality and the Morning Joe train wreck was roundly ridiculed by any self-respecting media follower, I observed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski whip themselves into a lather over the Koch Brothers, with Scarborough actually stating that these two dangerous billionaires who have systematically funded anti-union egotists like Scott Walker and out-of-touch zombies like Mitt Romney were “like, I think, most Americans.” Now Scarborough prostrates himself before the social media crowd as a penitent turncoat. And ten thousand people retweet him, even though Scarborough himself declared Trump a “centrist Democrat” three years ago and would undoubtedly alter his malleable ideology if it meant bigger ratings. I’ve met used car salesmen who I would trust more than Joe Scarborough.

But there’s actually someone much worse than all of these chickenheads.

Chuck Todd has no redeeming qualities as a human being. He has the mien and manner of a mangy dog who wants you to applaud as he’s playing with his balls, seemingly incapable of comprehending the vulgarity of the masturbatory act. He possesses nothing in the way of grace or humility and behaves on television with all the undeserved pomp and preen of a teenage pop star who can’t hold a tune but is inexplicably beloved by millions. His eyes dart around for attention and amusement. That ridiculous goatee doesn’t disguise the fact that he’s a grown up version of the snotty kid who throws a fit every time he stands in line at the supermarket. You get the sense that Todd would pop open the champagne if a cheap quip landed while thousands were mowed down by machine guns in the streets. He is an unctuous apologist for fascism and a gleeful normalizer of governmental malfeasance and human rights abuses. He is a dangerous dipstick who needs to be fired immediately and banned from and booed out of every newsroom. The combination of arrogance and stupidity is already problematic enough in the White House. Must we endure it on the national news as well?

How far have we fallen? Well, Tim Russert, a previous host of Meet the Press, was not only a highly accomplished interlocutor, but a man who went to law school and who served as chief of staff to Senator Daniel Moynihan. Todd, like many mediocre white men, went to George Washington University for a few years, dropped out, served as an office runner depositing checks for Tom Harkin’s campaign before inexplicably falling upward into the editor-in-chief position at the National Journal, ping-ponging his way over to NBC and into his present position of America’s #1 bullshit merchant.

The great joy I would take in seeing Chuck Todd thoroughly destroyed, the good money I would pay to see Chuck Todd pied in the face every day for the rest of his natural life, significantly outweighs my animosity towards the FOX News people, who are easily recognized as vile creatures who are propping up a far-right government with shameful propaganda and corrupting the minds of Americans. Todd, on the other hand, presents himself as the “sensible” pundit and thus the “reasonable” guy when he’s really just sugarcoating clear evils that the media must not take lightly.

Back in June, Todd earned rightful fury when he attempted to ding Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she correctly pointed out that America was running concentration camps on its southern border. Todd, with a twisted sociopathic rapid-fire glee that reveled more in being “right” rather than possessing any empathy or compassion for the lives of undocumented immigrants now suffering and even dying in these detention centers, replied, “Fair enough. But Congresswoman, tens of thousands were also brutalized, tortured, starved, and ultimately died in….concentration camps. Camps like Dachau. If you want to criticize the shameful treatment at our southern border, fine. You’ll have plenty of company. But be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps.” Ocasio-Cortez never said “Nazi concentration camps.” She said “concentration camps.” By everyknowndefinition of the word, concentration camps are precisely what is now happening in America — in that undocumented immigrants of a minority group are being held, mistreated, and suffering in a facility with armed guards. Todd, not unlike a white supremacist, not only glosses over the number of deaths in Auschwitz, Dachau, Belzec, et al. (believed to be around six million, not merely “tens of thousnads”). He conveniently discounts the disgraceful Japanese internment camps that flourished in America during World War II, where approximately 120,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes thanks to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. America also erected concentration camps in the Philippines just before the Spanish-American War.

Todd willfully spread misinformation about what concentration camps are, deliberately elided America’s past abuses, and significantly deflated the numbers and the severity of concentration camps throughout human history. He did all this, presumably because he wishes to mimic the strutting peacock of the network where he is now employed.

Chuck Todd, the irredeemable hack and superficial carnival barker, showed his true colors again when he viewed today’s Robert Mueller hearings purely through the haze of “optics” rather than substance. This ridiculous concern for aesthetics rather than substance and due process was swiftly rebuked by Columbia Journalism Review‘s Maria Bustillos, who pointed out that this fit into a pattern in which Todd is more interested in the “entertainment” of political coverage rather than the substance. She dug up a chart pointing out that Todd talked more than all but three of the presidential candidates in the last Democratic debate (and this when Todd had only been partially on stage).

When Meet the Press started on the Mutual radio network back in 1945, it was designed to promote The American Mercury — the same magazine for which the firebrand H.L. Mencken wrote for. Interestingly enough, the first host of Meet the Press — in its radio and television versions — wasn’t an arrogant jackass, but a thoughtful woman named Martha Rountree, who also created the show. It was Rountree’s express mission to ask difficult and provocative questions of major political figures in unrehearsed interviews. “There is nothing so refreshing as unadorned conviction,” said Rountree in a 1946 interview.

There hasn’t been a woman hosting Meet the Press on a regular basis since. I think it’s now time for a woman to take over the reins and steer the show away from its presently unpardonable adornments under Chuck Todd, whose recent interview with Trump is arguably the most embarrassing conversation in the show’s history. Todd let Trump get away with blatant falsehoods and gaslighting. He did not have the conviction or the skills to push back.

Chuck Todd’s gaffes, timidity, and anti-intellectualism can no longer be tolerated. He needs to be fired immediately. Maybe he’ll have a better career managing a nice restaurant, if only because the Yelp reviewers will hold him more accountable for being such a spineless and pusillanimous asshole than NBC ever will.

He was a monster who swore like a sailor, refused to wear seat belts, nearly poisoned me with a macrobiotic formula in my infancy, burned me with cigarette butts, bit me like a coward (bite marks disguised by long-sleeved shirts I wore to elementary school), and nearly asphyxiated me with a pillow. He was bad even before an auto accident in Fremont propelled him through the windshield of a VW bus, permanently scrambled his brain, and made him worse: more moody and abusive. He smoked Pall Malls. He sang and played guitar. He drank beer prodigiously. He sometimes gardened. He read books by Rod McKuen and had many other regrettable reading tastes that I thankfully didn’t mimic. He despised his job at the ZEP chemical facility. I’m pretty sure he loathed being a father. He was far lazier than I ever was, far lazier than I have ever been, and I suspect that one of the reasons I cultivated my crazy work ethic was because I remember his sloth and his entitlement, which shamed me and seemed permanently associated with the considerable physical and emotional abuse he meted towards me. I suspect his entitlement also made me angry towards anyone who felt entitled. Like him, I took up heavy drinking and heavy smoking at various times in my life. I am also quite liberal about my usage of the word “fuck” in everyday conversation, although I am decidedly cheerier about it than my dad was. His “fucks” were bitter missives hoping to decimate any and all joy around him.

I know that he’s in Oregon. Or was. The property associated with his name sold in 2016. So I have no idea where he lives now. He really liked to escape from people. He had paranoid tendencies. He had mental health issues, although, like my mother, he was never diagnosed. Perhaps a stubborn temperament was the cement that kept the unhappy marriage going so long. It’s one of the reasons why I am determined to leave the house and say hello to people every day, even though I simultaneously sustain the mystique of being the enigmatic bald creative dude in my Brooklyn neighborhood who says very few words about what he actually does. He aspired to be a writer. But, unlike me, he gave up. And I suspect this made him more bitter. I found a message thread a few years back in which he expressed how he had given up and how he made intricate toys pieced together from German kits and gave them to people. But it seemed to me that nobody returned these gestures and that he was very lonely and who the hell knows what else. Around the same time, I found a social media profile associated with his name and location in which a scantily clad woman was photographed in murky detail. Did he pay for someone? Why was this the only image? I do know that he cross-dressed. So who knows what the real sexual struggle was? Was my father angry because he could not be who he was? I do know that I get very angry when people demean and belittle me, especially when they make up stories and gaslight the narrative, although I am better these days about ignoring the haters and living a positive life.

The phone number I have for him is disconnected. I tried it about three years ago. I have not seen him in three decades. I spoke with him once on the phone when I lived in San Francisco. The call merely lasted for five minutes. I was in my early twenties. And I don’t recall saying anything of substance. I wish I had been wiser and stronger and bolder and more explicit about my need to reconcile this demon and the trauma his behavior inflicted on me. I wish I had tried to seek closure, to confront him with the pain that he caused me. But I wasn’t ready yet. I’m ready now, but I don’t have a working number.

Ten years ago, I wrote about him. My memories now are different, even though the reservoir of tearful thoughts I have to work from remains largely the same. I somehow don’t hate him. I just want to understand why he was such a monster and why he picked on a scrawny troubled kid and why he hated me. Because this screws a man up in ways that words can’t possibly convey, but that are best unpacked over a bottle of vodka with a trusted friend who will understand that I am trying my damnedest not to be selfish and that I am trying to be real and true and find new points of common empathy. I am still unmarried. I still do not have any children. I’ve reached the point in life where I wonder if it’s too late for me. For years, I’ve had this crazy idea that, if I can somehow start a family, I can erase the terrible one that I was cursed with and that caused me so much trouble in my adult years and that instilled my psyche with so many nightmares. But, of course, we all know that this is a stupid fantasy. You have to be honest about the hand you were dealt. But these are the melancholy thoughts you have a few weeks before your birthday. These are the thoughts you have when all you really have is yourself and you wonder if loving yourself can ever be enough.

In previous years, Independence Day was second only to Halloween as my favorite holiday. You’d show up to a park or a porch in your T-shirt and shorts, catch up with old pals casually overseeing a barbeque thronged with succulent chicken breasts slathered with promising sauce and glistening corn cobs that matched the searing hues of sunshine, and toss back a few beers while giddily tossing ground bloom flowers into the streets with a free-wheeling anarchy that was almost an instinctive homage to our founding firebrands. You’d set aside any stark political differences with casual unifying banter, knowing instinctively that the true quality bonding this nation was the invitational and subdued empathy of the American people. Very often you’d end up making out with a stranger, finding yourself in an unexpected summer romance and experiencing fireworks on the ground level that matched the bright showers exploding in the sky. The Fourth of July was the perfect midpoint to both summer and the year, allowing all to take stock in what had been accomplished and what was still possible. It was never an overtly jingoistic holiday — at least not for me or the people who I gathered with.

This is the kind of evil and unfathomable domestic policy that should cause anyone possessing even the tiniest sliver of a human heart to set aside their tongs and their big bags of fireworks to march loudly in the goddamned streets, vociferously denouncing the barbarism that our nation now practices without true representative resistance. But much like the epidemics of racism and gun massacres, we’ve grown accustomed to the comfort of looking the other way. We’re so seduced by the easy and enchanting susurrus of normalization, of pushing clear human abuses out of sight and out of mind to munch on our hamburgers, that the present administration only needs to keep ratcheting up the ghastly bar, counting on the fact that most Americans simply don’t or won’t give a shit.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” she depicted a thriving city called Omelas united by a Festival of Summer. The citizens were blissfully happy, but there was one small cost for this revelry:

In a basement under the one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is near ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes — the child has no understanding of time or interval — sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves for legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

America has become Omelas. The eerie parallels between the horrific conditions that Le Guin imagined and the realities that the children now suffering in the concentration camps are too nightmarishly exact. I remember this story being taught in high school and college. And there wasn’t a single student I recall who would attend the Festival of Summer knowing that this child existed. Today, I doubt very highly that any of these grown adults would say no to a festive holiday. How little we learn from the fiction that is meant to imbue us with empathy and compassion. But at least I can do my part by resisting a contradiction that should never have become fact in the first place.

It is clear that what now passes for the United States of America is a travesty of meanness and gleeful shame inflicted on the wanting and the impoverished, a sick cartoonish sideshow writ large into a heartless spectacle tacitly endorsed by both bloodthirsty Republicans who refuse to remonstrate against these inhumane conditions and the spineless Democratic arm led by the tepid and ineffectual Nancy Pelosi. While true progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren have been out in the field trying to get more information, genuinely caring about the plight of those who suffer, our disgraceful Speaker snoozes and roosts like a smug barnacle patiently awaiting her soy milk latte as people in need desperately approach her for drastic change. In a lengthy report from William T. Vollmann recently published in Harper’s (bless the man for his indefatigable diligence), the prolific writer simply talked to the immigrants, photographing the “black insignia[s] of humiliation” around their ankles and observing the salient and very human reasons why these innocents would wish to flee to America — namely, to escape violence and mayhem. (A detailed study by The Marshall Project earlier this year showed no impact on local crime from immigrants. Numerous other studies reveal inflated numbers from ICE and observe that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crime than the average American citizen.)

Like it or not, the immigrants who are mistreated and debased in the concentration camps are Americans. They have lives here and they are deserving, like any human being on this planet, of nobelesse oblige. So long as Americans are starved and denied sleep and bedecked with life-scarring trauma by callous ICE stooges who would sacrifice empathy for the glee of seeing them dead, I refuse to participate in a holiday that now represents a country united by blissful and complicit ignorance. Instead, I will spend the day reciting the Declaration of Independence to remind myself of just what this nation used to be, burning an American flag (a legal act of expressive resistance we thankfully still have) to protest our collective culpability, and thinking about how I can spend my time fighting the bastards with everything I have. These seem to me the only true duties of a principled patriot. I hope that you can find it within your heart to do something similar.